If you met anyone as whiny, as disobliging and ego centric as the average narrator of a novel in real life you’d find them unbearable. You’d give them about five minutes before you excused yourself to get another drink, or moved to a different carriage, or asked to be transferred to an alternative department so you didn’t have to work with them anymore.
I’m not like that.
I love life. I love being alive.
Sometimes I don’t. That’s not unusual. You don’t always love being alive. Nobody does.
I’m an actor.
That’s just something I wanted to get out of the way at the beginning.
It is also why I will speak to you in present tense. The silliest tense. And also the closest we come to talking directly to God.
I will have little choice over what I choose to include or omit.
I will be completely known.
At the moment, for instance, I am waiting to cross the road to meet my friend Claudio at a Middle Eastern restaurant called Indigo Mood. I am unable to cross because a double-decker bus has stopped directly in
front of me, and I am anxious in case, by the time I have negotiated the length of the bus to slip between it and a black SUV, the traffic will start moving and I will have to hold my hands up in apology as I dash across, possibly into the path of an oncoming van in the next lane. The more I hesitate the more likely this becomes.
To skirt over my present reduced circumstances: I have not had a paid job in three months, and that was a murder-mystery dinner show (jazz age champagne-factory owner). I am a month behind on my rent and
while I have found a way to pay this month’s, the month in arrears squats on my shoulder and grins like a gatepost dragon. I am behind on most utility bills. I have measured out my life in coffees I cannot technically afford.
So when Claudio offers to buy me a falafel in Indigo Mood, a restaurant selected for its proximity to his flat, I accept.
He runs a hand through his curly black hair and tells me it’s good to see me. It’s been too long.
I tell him I know what his schedule is like.
Nah, fuck off, says Claudio. That’s no excuse. I don’t want to lose touch like that again. I need you to keep me human.
I’m not sure I’m the best person to do that.
Yeah yeah, he says. You’re the most human guy I know.
Claudio and I get on well because we have known each other since the age of seven, which is to say thirty years, and we have, at some base level, no respect for one another: We do not fall for one another’s hasty renovations of character or revisionist sophistications; we are not convinced by one another’s adult selves. Before he found his place in the world, Claudio was, for me, a point of endlessly reassuring comparison: I may not have made much of my potential, but then there’s Claudio. I may be useless with money, but then there’s Claudio. I may have an addictive personality, but Claudio has literal, bona fide addictions. I imagine he still sees me in exactly the same way: as a seven-year-old. And, being financially if not culturally very secure, he likely sees the very same flaws in me that I do in him. Claudio. The Cloud. His mother was Portuguese.
How much do you think one of those costs? I say.
What?
I point to the chilled counter, dressed salads and swords of raw meat under glass, glistening bottles of fizzy drinks.
How much does a commercial chiller cabinet cost? says Claudio. I don’t know? A couple of grand? Why?
I have found myself obsessed with how much things cost. I have become obsessed with money, I tell him.
Oh man, says Claudio. That’s rough. That’s not for you. You should be focusing on the life of the mind.
How long would it take me to even make the down payment on a chilled sandwich counter? I say. And then several years to pay it off, by which time it would have become obsolete and leaky and wouldn’t keep things at the correct temperature and I’d have to find the deposit to buy another.
The thing is you don’t need to worry about that, says Claudio. You are never going to be in a position to need a commercial chiller cabinet.
That’s probably true.
I take a bite of my wrap. The tahini, the fresh mint leaves, the granular, yielding texture. The wrap has been assembled with such pride it almost brings me to tears.
Look, homes, these random fixations sound to me like generalized anxiety disorder, says Claudio, caused by the conditions inherent to late capitalism. If you’d let me loan you some money—
No.
I could get you through this patch and you could concentrate on your work.
Ha, I say. You’d be like my patron.
I could be your patron, says Claudio. Think about it.
Claudio, at the beginning, had many patrons, but now he makes enough through ad revenue that he’d probably be okay if they abandoned him.
I could be your patron, baby, he sings.
I am not too proud to accept Claudio’s generosity. I have never turned down a drink. But I do not borrow money from friends; it messes things up. Especially when you think it won’t.
Actually, though, I say, I am on my way somewhere.
Work?
Yes.
You got a part?
An audition.
That’s great! Stage?
More site specific. About climate change.
This is really good news, says Claudio, and he means it, god bless him, and takes a bite of his wrap. Things are looking, how you say, up?
Things are looking, how you say, up.
*
There was a time when a genuinely bohemian lifestyle was possible, by which I mean economically feasible. Where it persists now, it is only as cosplay for bored kids with private
incomes.
My belly is full of falafel and wet, well-seasoned salads. The traffic parts for me like the Red Sea.
I have a small hoop earring. I keep my hair short because I have strong features. I try to have the utmost contempt for money, but the fact is that I must find £1,400 per month to cover my basic expenses: rent, utility bills, council tax. I could reduce this, negligibly, by taking a room in a shared house, but I am not the type and value my solitude. Anything I make on top of £1,400 (an amount, I should add, that in my youth seemed an unimaginably large sum, an impossible fortune, but that now I must somehow come up with every four weeks) is for food, and I have cultivated an obsession for eating simply and frugally. Dense rye breads, dried fruits, porridge. I currently have a bowl of borlotti beans soaking in the kitchenette.
Clothes I receive twice annually: for my birthday (an end of summer baby, naturally, condemned to spend my entire education small for my age because I was almost a year younger than my immediate peers) and for Christmas (when the dominant are born) from my parents. I favor two pairs of immensely durable black jeans (which take over three years to fade and fray and require replacement) white button-down shirts and the occasional jumper. I have had the same overcoat since 2002. I’m wearing it now. I have learned how to repair pockets and sew on buttons on YouTube.
Holding a needle between my teeth and squinting at a faux-silk lining under lamplight is when I feel closest to some notion of the bohemian ideal.
I never go on holiday and have no interest in doing so, but early in my vocation I had the chance to travel, expenses only, to South America and East Asia, with a street-theater group, long disbanded. In this sense I am very much a man of the world, a seasoned traveler, someone with a broadened mind who has been exposed to other cultures, who knows and is true to himself because he now sees himself with absolute clarity.
An Englishman.
LMFAO, as they say.
You met that Englishman? He’s so English.
What else do people spend money on? I like to drink, I ought to admit that, and cannot imagine any other way of transporting myself from the day into the night. I’m picky. A blended Scotch is perfectly acceptable as long as it’s the right blended Scotch. I buy alcohol on a credit card and it is the only thing I use the credit card for. I pay off my tab whenever I land a part that nets me sufficient funds.
My résumé is in innumerable piles on innumerable desks as we speak.
Little applications for indefinite leave to remain at the gates of heaven.
I stop to pick up a twenty-pence piece at the side of a drain. I flick off a fragment of something black and slip it into my pocket.
I am past caring but I am not past the vision of a future self, as real as any memory, a glass of wine on my veranda, reflecting on this, this now, as the low point of my career; giving an interview, on my veranda, to a quietly anxious journalist about how this was the low point of my career and how close I came to giving up. I’m not over that yet.
*
All of this is important. I am not important, but what I have to tell you is very important. Something is badly wrong. All hell is about to break loose. I see visions. We all do. I am not a pessimist, but something is very badly wrong and that which we held to be foundational is beginning to liquefy. The bien-pensant opinion is that we have never been more divided; how sad it is that we are more divided than we’ve ever been, so sad. But that’s not it. It’s neither true nor sad and at the very least the things we commit to language ought to be one or the other.
Depending on your perspective I am probably, objectively, quite poorly educated. I sat in silent consternation while my teachers lost their composure with my more boisterous contemporaries, hour after hour, term after term. I developed an elaborate inner world I’ve never really left. You’ll forgive me if I occasionally mispronounce a word. You won’t be able to tell.
*
I check the walking route on my phone at the pelican crossing. Thirty-three minutes. I will reach the audition with sufficient time to stop sweating but not so much as to start fussing and doubting my worth. Good.
Something I love: plays. I love it when someone—a writer—has written a really good play, with characters and dialogue and a story that may be interpreted and realized by a director and a cast of actors in a theater. Love it. I love all of it: the drawing room farce and the discombobulating three-hour monologue with no fixed speaker. Good plays are probably my favorite thing in all the world.
I have nothing but disdain for the alternative.
Unfortunately the alternative is the most readily available work—my, as it were, bread and butter—and the more time I spend in exploratory movement and stillness, hot seat improv, “researching a stimulus as a team,” collaborative enterprise, reflective logbooks, space / time / weight / flow, “creating a unified vision as an ensemble,” the more I say yes to such joyless and culturally moribund opportunities, the more such opportunities open up to me, like a giant origami flower made of tax returns.
The subject matter is always worthy: modern slavery; the long-term effects of early exposure to extreme pornography; zero-hours contracts. Who among the theater-going public doesn’t want their awareness of these horrors raised? Pried open, if necessary?
I feign enthusiasm, I give it everything, all the while feeling like someone is constantly slapping me in the stomach with an old brown shoe. All the while participating directly in the desecration of the one true art I live for. For subsistence wages.
I’m very cooperative and a good liar. Forty-five days of concerted effort, glorified trust exercises, listening and listening to each other, especially listening when someone says something demonstrably stupid or just plain wrong lest any of us be thought undemocratic; pages and pages that resemble less a play than a module-evaluation form or minutes of a local council meeting, drills and rehearsals, rehearsals and drills. Eventually, and with great collective dedication, to produce, time and time again, a show of such suffocating mediocrity, I could cry thinking about it.
I balance these jobs with murder-mystery dinner theater, which I find slightly less degrading.
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From Black Bag by Luke Kennard. Copyright © 2026 by Luke Kennard. Excerpted by permission of Zando.
